Arundel Remembered

Andrew Dawnay

Early days with Jim and Hanna Stevenson

My interview for the education officer’s job was a laid back affair conducted on sofas and beaten up armchairs in the curator’s house, which was in the Duke’s old dairy. I remember that the book-lined walls had been painted dark green and hung with original artwork. Andrew Dawnay, who was the curator, would ask the questions and then Brigadier Steve Goodall would tell me the answers. They were both so enthusiastic about the great madcap venture that was to become the Wildfowl Trust’s little gem at Arundel that I fell for the place hook line and sinker, and for them too. They were inspirational people to be with. 

Roger

The best question came from Steve who asked me how I would explain why we should conserve blue whales when most of us would never see one. I reeled off Peter Scott’s “Four Pillars of Nature Conservation” and watched them glaze over. “Well”, said Steve, “I like to ask them to imagine a world without whales, the biggest mammals on our planet, roaming the seas. Would it be a better world without whales, or would it have lost some of its magic?” 

The idea that a child could fall asleep imagining those leviathan’s out there, hoping one day to see one was easy to relate to. And Steve was right of course. We justify the science, the knowledge, the potential for financial gain and the ethics, but it’s our sheer sense of wonder that is the trigger for all of us. That’s just what the Trust wanted an education officer for, to create a sense of wonder and magic that would stay with children long after their visit. It would also be nice if I brought in some income!

Johnny, Chris and Roger.

I was left to my own devices quite a bit because we didn't have a finished building and it was winter. There weren’t many visitors, so I got to hang out with the ground-staff; Roger, Johnny, Steve, Jo, Chris and Terry. Roger and Johnny were kept very busy with the development of the site so I saw more of the younger lads.

Steve

On my first tour of the grounds I learned about the feeding routine from Steve while Chris did all the work of pushing the wheelbarrow and bailing out grain for the collection birds and their wild cousins (mostly mallards and Canada geese.) Chris was showing off, scattering grain over a wide arc of the lake when he lost his grip on the metal scoop and knocked out a rather valuable duck. I’m afraid I couldn't stop laughing at the time.

Steve was the quiet one, but he was a really keen birder and so became my guide to the wild area. He introduce me to bearded tits, a spotted crake, bittern, Cetti’s warblers and all sorts of passing rarities. 

Joe with Shirley.

Joe was the most creative and sensitive member of the team and he was the one who taught me most about aviculture. He seemed to have an instinct for the needs of each individual duckling or gosling and he was entrusted with some of the most rare and valuable birds in captivity. Later he would introduce me to his other love, which was ballet. 

My transport at the time was a lumbering Russian Moskvitch that I bought for £70. I really couldn’t afford to run it but I nursed it along using parts from a local scrap yard where they got to know me very well. We had a good workshop at the duckery, complete with a deep inspection pit, but the biggest asset we had in the yard was Bill the handyman. He could make or fix anything and he gave me loads of advice on how to fix the car. That’s how I found myself standing in the pit looking up at the bottom of my car trying to work out what order in which to undo the nuts. 

Bill

The gear box came free remarkably quickly, crashing down between my feet where it stuck upright in the ground. The crash (and some suitable expletives from me) brought Bill and Terry away from making their lunchtime toast that Bill made on the two bar electric fire using a coat hanger as a toasting fork. Terry would eat his sandwiches while sitting on a beam, ten feet off the ground. I don’t think Health and Safety had been invented then.

Bill had his own special vocabulary. He used “smell-a-nose paint” for example, while Terry had (and still has) a wicked sense of humour. 

Terry cleaned up remarkably well after work.

One morning I drove past Terry near the castle and stopped to offer him a lift into work. He stood with hands on hips and appraised my Russian wreck and replied. “Not thanks Mate, I’m in a hurry.”

With no schools to take around and no office to work from, my base in the spring was a bench next to the garden shed which was the entrance kiosk and shop, run by a chap called Reg who mostly employed his family members. They brought a close family feel to the reserve and made everyone feel especially welcome. Security was pretty basic; the keys and the float were kept in a blue-tit box outside the shed. Maybe they still are?

Reg and family at home.

Apart from the admission charge, our biggest money-earner was duck food which we had to pour into brown paper bags. My bench was a bit hard on the bum so I would fill bags while sitting in the folding wheelchair. If you want to double your sales of bird food, my advice is to get a wheelchair. I sold tons while I was still bagging it up.

By spring I still had no building and no bookings, so I was sent off on a tour of the Wildfowl Trust centres for a sort of induction. At Slimbridge I learned a huge amount from Joe Blossom and his education team and I met some of my heroes in the conservation and research side.

Young Jim.

My parents had taken me to Slimbridge in 1960 or thereabouts and I begged them to buy me a smallish Peter Scott painting. It cost £30, which was about two weeks pay at the time. I’ve seen it since and it was going for over £3,000 which is about a month's pay, so it has only doubled in value really!  Anyway, I had to be content with a postcard, but that visit stuck with me. It was a bit of a life changer at the age of ten. Later I would get to know Peter and Phillipa quite well. Most heroes don't look so good when you get up-close but Peter did and he remains a great man to me.

Incidentally, when the Sussex Wildlife Trust opened their new centre at Woods Mill, they brought David Attenborough down to cut the ribbon. As the Trust staff were all busy in the background, they asked me to look after David! What an amazing day that was. 

At Martin Mere I met another of my conservation heroes, Dr Janet Kear. I stayed at her house in the grounds that she ran like a B&B. She did the cooking and was the perfect host despite working very long days as curator of the reserve and writing a steady stream of books on wildfowl and flamingos,as well as countless scientific papers. She later became chairman of the British Ornithologists' Union. After supper she would send us all out onto the lawn to pull up thistles so that the geese wouldn’t get sore feet.

The education team at Martin Mere was quite large and it was a busy place. My opposite number there offered to take me out for a meal. In a lovely Lancashire accent he said "Coming from down south you'll be a wine drinker. Janet is too, but you'll find we're beer drinkers up here." I never got the chance to introduce him to Gayle's HSB.

They had inherited a load of old museum specimens that they used as hands-on education material until they fell apart. I seem to remember the smell of arsenic and formaldehyde was quite strong. As I said, Health and Safety hadn't yet been invented. The stuffed birds were being replaced by fibreglass casts, which looked pretty good when painted up, but didn't feel at all fluffy. I came away with quite a few heads and feet of birds that I made by dunking dead birds into latex and then peeling it off like a rubber glove to use as a mould. The evil smell of Victorian preservatives was replaced with the futuristic and eye-watering smell of curing fibreglass resin.

Feeding time with Terry.

  
The Trust’s Welney Wash reserve was a whole different proposition. Josh Scott was the warden at the  time and I don't remember seeing anyone else all week. He was quite a character; a real Fensman from Peter’s duck-hunting days, and man of very few words, all of them short. He told me that he could use an education officer like me, if I could herd cattle and drive a JCB. What he meant was that he thought I was as much use to him as a pair of Joe's ballet slippers. I spent the whole week birdwatching on my own. I didn't get bored though because it was spring and I saw ruffs, harriers, garganey, godwits and my first spotted redshank in its elegant black breeding plumage.

On Thursday Josh asked me where I was staying that night. I replied that I was booked in for the week and he said “No you ain't” adding that his wife didn't do B&B on Thursdays but I could come back on Friday!

I drove over to Rutland Water and slept the night in my car. The police moved me on every two hours and I was wide awake before dawn. I waited until nine and then banged on the warden’s door and met Tim Appleton who invited me in for breakfast. Another celebrity tick!

The new building, designed by Neil Holland, was a palace. It was made up of a concrete raft that supported a series of interlocking octagonal units, topped out to reflect the design of the old dairy across the road.  (Neil told me at our reunion that Peter thought he should have used hexagons, because that's what bees do, but Neil had replied that octagons are made up of right angles and that makes it easier to explain to builders.) 

I had my own lecture theatre, projection room and classroom, as well as the run of the grounds. By late spring the schools and tourists were rolling in and soon I was getting a tan in the grounds with schools most of the time. 

Richard Kemp

Andrew followed me round and appraised my performance. 
“Most of your facts are wrong!” he said, but he went on to say that I made up for my lack of knowledge with my enthusiasm. It’s a good job I didn’t become a brain surgeon then.

By the first winter I had started to get a lot of bookings for talks, mostly to the Women’s Institute but all sorts of community groups as well. I would tour the Sussex Downs with my projector and screen, and a few sales goods. On the evenings when I wasn't doing talks I was out at folk clubs or involved in amateur dramatics. Then I was captured by a silver bearded and silver tongued eccentric called Fletch.

Fletch had spent his career in radio and soon had me recording programmes on a portable reel-to-reel tape machine. My projection room soon became a recording studio with a big multitrack machine and an editing kit that consisted of a razor blade and some sticky tape. The room also had a slide-sorting table and multiple projectors for movies and slides. Pig heaven!

My broadcasts went out on BBC Radio Solent. I still do some radio work today and I hope Fletch knows that he was a huge influence on me.

Back in the new building, our secretary Shirley took control of everything and soon had bookings for catered parties. The first big one was a curry night, and inevitably quite a lot ended up on the new carpets. The smell gave the place an oriental atmosphere for years to come. Later we added our own restaurant with Shirley in charge. 

Meanwhile Reg’s emporium had taken off, but as any shopkeeper knows, you need as much space again for storage as you do for sales. That’s how I lost the attic above my theatre. If anyone wants a few thousand Peter Scott calendars from the 1980s, that’s the place to look. At Christmas the shop spread into the classroom too. I didn't mind as I reckoned that the kids had seen enough of classrooms before they came to us.

________________

I lived in a very old cottage out at Fontwell. It was due for demolition when the new A27 came through so the rent was cheap. It had a fireplace as big as a small room and I used to fall asleep with my feet on the grate. I melted my boots several times. 

Hanna

One rainy evening there was a knock on the door. I peered into the dark and saw a young woman standing there. Hanna Kist was an intern from Chicago who had been placed at Slimbridge, potentially on her way to work on mountain gorillas with Diane Fossey in Rwanda. She was going to spend a while with us at Arundel, but it all went wrong and she ended up staying on as our volunteer coordinator and eventually, my wife. Of course I didn't know any of this at the time and wondered what I was going to do with her. For a start, she didn't dress like the girls I knew. She was wearing blue chords with matching blue moccasins and a blue puffer jacket over a white polo-neck embroidered with little red hearts (or was it strawberries?) with matching socks. In contrast, I was wearing a scuffed Barbour coat, wool plus-fours, long socks and big boots and I had long, lank hair and half a moustache. I was probably smoking a pipe too. The good thing about her was that she had a great American accent and could swear to beat the band.

Together we built up a huge team of dedicated volunteers and a smaller team of staff, paid for by a government job-creation scheme. As well as doing the education and interpretation work the whole team got involved in our wedding that was held in the gallery overlooking the swan lake. Richard Kemp did the invitations, Jeremy Leggett took the photos, Shirley did the catering, Sally arranged the flowers.  It was the best party ever. I peddled Hanna up Mill Road in the dark on the crossbar of an old Raleigh bike with no lights. The only way to navigate was to look up at the stars and stay in the gap between the arching lime trees that were silhouetted against the sky.
  
A year later, we spent our last night in Arundel at Andrew’s house. He was such a dear friend to us and treated us like family. We felt like traitors leaving him and it was a big wrench for us to set off for our new life in Scotland. As we drove off in an overladen Citroen he shook his head and said “Farewell my Chickens” and “I bet you don't make it in that car.” 

We made it to Petersfield.